It’s time to think of your career as an adventure.
Often when we think about careers we think about a climbing a ladder.
Yet the reality for many of us is that a safe and sturdy ladder doesn’t exist. Consequently, the next step on our career path is often uncertain or unclear.
At Tailored Thinking we find it useful to think of your at a career as an adventure, or set of adventures . An adventure is exciting, bold and sometimes scary. There are opportunities to take risks and to learn and develop.
Rather than having an expectation that your career should be neatly defined, thinking about your career as an adventure encourages you to grow, learn and develop.
The (fabulous) team at Amazing If, encourages to consider our careers as squiggly. Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis talk about why people should embrace squiggly careers.
Firstly, they believe that a career is personal to the individual, there is no one size fits all career. Secondly, having a squiggly career enables and encourages people to develop in different directions. Sarah and Helen explain this further in their TEDx talk.
Thinking differently about your career
Here are 2 exercises to get you started to think about different career options, pathways and adventures.
1) An exercise for crafting your career adventure
This exercise involves peering into the future and considering what you might be doing from a career perspective in 5 , 10 or even 25 years’ time. We recommend sketching out 2 or 3 different career scenarios or adventures you might have. Questions to consider are:
In 2 – 25 years’ time what would be your dream job be internal and/or external to your current organisation?
What will you be doing – what would a typical day or week look like? (what will you be doing, who will you be engaging with, what knowledge and skills will be using)
What skills and experiences will you need to develop further to be able to fulfil this career adventure?
Having a clear image of a future work self can enable and encourage us to create, find and seize opportunities to do things in our current jobs that we might not otherwise have had the courage or conviction to try.
2) Craft your career with job crafting
The secret of many people with fulfilling and engaging jobs isn’t that they have waited to find the perfect job, instead they have created, or crafted that role themselves. You can read about job crafting in more detail here.
One way to take positive control of your job and career is through a concept called “job crafting”. Job crafting enables us to find opportunities for growth and innovation from within the jobs we already have.
Some questions that might get you started with job crafting:
What skills or knowledge are you most interesting in developing further? Why is this? (skill crafting)
What are your strongest relationships at work? (relationship crafting)
What relationships would you like to build further? (relationship crafting)
What gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment in your work? Why do you think this is? (purpose crafting)
What changes could be made to your job to improve your health and wellbeing? (wellbeing crafting)
If you approach job crafting with a combination of curiosity and commitment you start to shift your work in a positive direction that will make it more enjoyable and stimulating in the present and ultimately more rewarding in the future.
Careers are things that you build rather than things that you are given. Whether linear, up, down, small, big or simply squiggly we wish you all the best with your career. Happy adventures.
To learn more about job crafting and how it is linked to career growth and progression you can download our free job crafting guide here.
